1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data transfer and, more particularly, to systems and methods for improving traffic bandwidth.
2. Description of Related Art
Network devices, such as routers, receive data on physical media, such as optical fiber, analyze the data to determine its destination, and output the data on physical media in accordance with the destination. Routers were initially designed using a general purpose processor executing large software programs. As line rates and traffic volume increased, however, general purpose processors could not scale to meet the new demands. For example, as new functions, such as accounting and policing functionality, were added to the software, these routers suffered performance degradation. In some instances, the routers failed to handle traffic at line rate when the new functionality was added.
To meet the new demands, purpose-built routers were designed. Purpose-built routers are designed and built with components optimized for routing. They not only handle higher line rates and higher network traffic volume, but they also add functionality without compromising line rate performance.
A conventional purpose-built router may include a number of input and output ports from which it receives and transmits streams of data packets. A switching fabric may be implemented in the router to carry the packets between the ports. In a high-performance purpose-built router, the switching fabric may transmit a large amount of data between a number of internal components.
The ports of a conventional router may, individually or in combination handle multiple packet streams. As a result, chip-to-chip communication inside a router may include multiple or single stream communications. The chip-to-chip communication may include a high speed interface to facilitate the multiple or single stream communication. To realistically handle the high speed data transfers, the internal transfers of packets or bursts need to occur at a slower speed for ease of implementation. The result is that this slower speed data transfer needs to be wide (e.g., 64 bytes or 128 bytes). The higher the speed of the external transfer, the wider the internal transfer becomes.
The interface may use a protocol that requires all data bursts on the internal transfer, except for end-of-packet bursts, to be multiples of 16 bytes. Not all packets, however, include data that is a multiple of 16 bytes. This results in one or more idles being generated to fill the burst at the end of a packet. The presence of idles results in an under-utilization of bandwidth. The wider the internal transfer is then the greater the bandwidth reduction becomes because of the idles.
As a result, there is a need for systems and methods that better utilize bandwidth by minimizing the occurrence of idles at the end of a packet.